SQL Rally 2012 had a diverse group of speakers and something for all levels of experience. I personally dug the talk Suresh did on 2012 memory internals. Mike Fal(twitter|blog) was the SQL Rally swan song. He is an example of how far you can come in one year.

WIT Panel Negotiation

I was nervous about my first WIT luncheon panel. I was lucky in my life to have strong female role models and have always fostered women in technology. Having the opportunity to talk about something men and women in IT struggle with was just awesome.

Yay! People came to my session. They also asked some great questions and were very attentive. The minute you just expect people to be there and hang on your every word is the moment you have taken yourself too seriously. I’m always grateful for the opportunity to teach and share what I know AND to learn what others have experienced as well.

One of the things that people may dismiss is the networking opportunities that SQL Rally, SQLSaturday and PASS Summit afford you. I’ve met people and made friendships that have had lasted a decade. I look forward to the PASS Summit and to the SQLSaturdays I’m attending the rest of the year.

Wes Brown is a PASS chapter leader and SQL Server MVP. He writes for SQL Server Central and maintains his blog at http://www.sqlserverio.com. Wes is Currently serving as a Senior Lead Consultant at Catapult Systems. Previous experiences include Product Manager for SQL Litespeed by Quest software and consultant to fortune 500 companies. He specializes in high availability, disaster recovery and very large database performance tuning. He is a frequent speaker at local user groups and SQLSaturdays.